Two elements are the extended reach of everybody and self-defense capabilities:
[General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] — who will be a keynote speaker at September’s Defense News Conference — laid out a vision in which every force can both defend itself and have a deep-strike capability to hold an enemy at bay, built around a unified command-and-control system.
“A naval force can defend itself or strike deep. An air force can defend itself or strike deep. The Marines can defend itself or strike deep,” he said. “Everybody.”
That “everybody” includes international partners, Hyten added, as the U.S. operates so often in a coalition framework that this plan only works if it can integrate others.
But making sure those elements have the targeting data is a challenge:
One of the biggest challenges for Collins, the Army’s new acquisition chief for tactical networks (aka PEO-C3T)? Getting data on potential targets from intelligence systems to combat units fast enough to strike them with the new long-range artillery and high-speed helicopters now in development. Digitally connecting the widest possible range of “sensors” to “shooters” in this way is the focus of Army Futures Command’s Project Convergence experiment starting this fall.
The types of data you want to access, Collins and other officers told a Potomac Officers’ Club webinar on Tuesday, range from full-motion video to electronic warfare detections of enemy transmitters. Quickly pooling that many kinds of data, from that many different sources, will require heavy use of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
With everybody shooting you can't have six incoming rounds with your defenders clumping up 5 defensive shots aimed at just one of the incoming rounds.
You also have to make sure you aren't clumping on offense.
And you have to do it fast.
Not to mention avoiding friendly fire at the range and speed of action that future battles will have.
Oh, and God help us if the system can be hacked.
So that's going on.
